Mark Bell's Power Project - Ben Greenfield || MBPP Ep. 920
Episode Date: April 18, 2023In this Podcast Episode, Ben Greenfield, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about outside the box methods for improving your physical and mental health. Follow Ben on IG: https://www.in...stagram.com/bengreenfieldfitness/  New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw  Special perks for our listeners below! ➢Better Fed Beef: https://betterfedbeef.com/pages/powerproject  ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin!  ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!  ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM  ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes!  ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements!  ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off!  ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order!  ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori!  ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep!  ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off!  ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150  Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject  FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell  Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en   Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz  #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject
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He puts a needle like three inches into your neck.
Black, tarry substance.
It has a higher amount of minerals than like any substance on the planet.
Did you feel like you needed to learn a lot of these things to advance yourself as an athlete?
Do you do anything around your sleep?
And I've been talking about this for a while.
I've always thought that like some of these things need to come with a skull and crossbones and some warnings.
Yeah.
What's some of the deal with grounding?
Are you a big fan of it?
You think it works a lot?
What's your thoughts?
And then maybe what's some of the science?
Well, I mean, obviously, just walking outside barefoot or on the beach
or actually swimming in the ocean or even being in one of those stainless steel cold tubs.
Those are super grounding.
I had a building biologist come to my house and measure how much grounding effect this 7.83 hertz, this human resonance that the earth emits, how much I was getting exposed to that when I was on a grounding mat versus outside versus in the pool, in the cold tub.
And I think that was in the Morosco one, that super cold one, but it's metal, super grounded inside of that.
So you get the benefit of the cold and the grounding at the same time.
But then a lot of these mats that you plug into the wall, most of them come with a way to test like a three-prong plug that you can plug in
and test to make sure that the outlet is properly grounded
because apparently a lot of homes
don't have properly grounded outlets.
But when you plug into that,
anytime there is, I think you would call it
like an AC power surge,
like an alternating current surge in the house,
apparently that's not so great for you.
So it's better if you were going to use one of these grounding mats to literally have it,
like I have in my office, like a cable going out and plugged into the ground.
And I feel like you're a little bit more stable energy-wise when you're standing on that thing
while you're working during the day.
But yeah, I think there's something to grounding and earthing.
Sorry to cut you off.
When you guys were testing stuff,
did you by any chance just test like tap water out of the faucet?
I'm asking because one of our buddies, Carl Lenore,
kind of did like his own version of a test.
And he just had like shower water into like a cup
and then he measured that.
And it was actually like the results were like kind of crazy.
It was like completely grounded.
Really? Yeah. Yeah, it's like a a shower i don't know how that would work well a shower supposedly could be ground grounding but i guess maybe it would also
maybe depend it has to be surrounded by some form like metal conductivity yeah so what about
the pipes and stuff i don't know yeah i mean because there's there's all sorts of different
terms that get thrown around in the water industry.
You know, you got like hydrogen water, which I think is great.
That's like the one that has all the research that's been done over in Japan on the selective antioxidant properties of hydrogen-rich water.
And so now you can get these tablets that you put in the water or even these hydrogen water generators.
And apparently molecular hydrogen as a gas dissolved in water is wonderful
from an antioxidant standpoint.
And I even, like when I'm doing like long-haul flights,
I keep a little capsule of that in my bag,
and I'll put these hydrogen tablet pills that dissolve.
They dissolve in like three or four minutes.
You're supposed to drink it right away,
and you're literally like drinking the hydrogen gases.
So there's that.
And then another trend is like this deuterium-depleted water.
Have you guys heard of this?
I have heard of it, but I don't know much about it.
It's called DDW.
So deuterium is an isotope of hydrogen.
And you guys are probably familiar with the electron transport chain in the cells and how that involves –
A little bit, but we're meatheads.
So run us through as much as you think is necessary.
Movement of hydrogen across the cell membrane is one of the ways that electricity travels
through the cell and you eventually produce ATP.
That's kind of the bastardized explanation of it.
So deuterium is like hydrogen, but hydrogen would be like a ping pong ball and deuterium would
be like a bowling ball. So what deuterium does more or less is kind of gums up some of the electron
transport chain machinery. And so what people do to decrease the level of deuterium in their body
now is they drink DDW water. And so you can actually hook up with these testing companies.
There's a couple in California. I did one in LA. I think it's just called like the DDW Center or
something like that. And they test how much deuterium is in your body. And then you drink
deuterium depleted water to lower the level of deuterium. And apparently the way that deuterium
builds up in the body is by drinking water that has a lot of like pesticides, herbicides, chemicals and stuff like that in it.
And the way that the body makes its own deuterium depleted water is via the process of beta oxidation.
Beta oxidation is fat burning. you're eating a high amount of fats versus carbs or limiting your starch and sugar intake or doing ketosis or something like that. Like you're making a lot of deuterium depleted water in your own
cells. But if you want to naturally lower your deuterium levels even more, you could drink
deuterium depleted water. So that's another one is DDW water and hydrogen water. And then
structured water is another big one. That's where water would normally be considered to be H2O.
And the structured water involves bonding between the hydrogen and the oxygen so that you've got
not H2O, but H3O2 as a large component of the water. And that means the water is almost like
thicker. It's more like a gel.
And if you look at water in the intracellular compartments in your body, it is more of that
structured variety. It's more of a gel-like nature. And that allows for the transport of
electrons across the cell membrane and the carrying of a charge in the body. So what people say is
that if you drink structured water,
apparently it's more hydrating or it's more natural to the form of water
that's found in the body.
And if you look at water,
that's in a gel like format,
like say in,
um,
chia seed slurry or in fruits or like a sea moss gel or,
or even like insoluble fiber,
as you'd get if you were to,
um,
you know,
like there's a pasta alternative that I eat called Japanese yam noodles.
It's called miracle noodles and it's great because it's like this low carb,
low calorie noodle, but it's super satiating.
It's basically like eating a gel.
I think Quest messed around with trying to make something like that years and
years ago. Do you remember that?
Yeah. Yeah.
It came in some like weird seawater thing and it was like smelled fishy.
It smelled gross.
You remember that too?
Oh, yes.
I didn't dream it up.
Okay, good.
I like the angel hair pasta.
I'll get that and just make a big mess of that for lunch
and then sprinkle a bunch of nuts and a can of sardines in that.
It's great.
It's pretty fibrous.
It's almost like having pasta.
Fibrous, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's not like having a bunch of raw kale
that feels like it can kind of rip up your digestive tract a little bit.
Like it's almost like nourishing.
It has like this – it feels like it lines your digestive tract or almost kind of like protects it a little bit.
So it's kind of cool.
But that's also water that's in a more structured format. And so you can get structured water house filters now or water generators where
after the water passes through whatever filtration mechanism is in your house, like a
double carbon block or reverse osmosis or what have you, it would then pass through a structured
water generator, which is typically like a series of like minerals or glass beads. And it comes out
the other end and it's more of like a gel-like structure so that would be structured water so you got like structured you got hydrogenated you got dw um and then like
what you were asking andrew as far as a building biologist measuring the electrical conductivity
of the water i would imagine what they may have been looking at would be whether or not the water that's coming out of the tap is structured or not because um this is
based off of research by a guy i think his name's um he's up at university of washington he wrote
about book called cells gels and the engines of life uh dr gerald pollock and that book is all
about structured water and what he did in his lab was he showed that when you have structured water and you expose it to photons of light, like infrared light from the sun, the water will move up a glass pipette because there is a positive charge on the outside of the water.
And it interacts with the negative charge on the inside of a vessel to like pull water up against gravity and that's exactly how water moves in plants like
water and plants is naturally structured and so plants don't have a heart and so they can't like
pump water through the plant so the water travels against gravity through the plant because the water is structured.
And so the theory here is that from a physics standpoint, the heart is not capable in one pump of moving all the blood through the body.
And so the heart is actually in a shape in the chest called a tetrahedral shape.
And so when your heart pumps, it's like spiralizing.
It's not just like ba-boom, but it's like kind of moving
in almost like a tornado-like format when it pumps.
That spins the blood, structures the blood,
causes the blood to have less resistance as it moves through the vessels,
creates that positive charge on the inside,
which interacts with the negative charge on the vascular wall,
and the water in the blood is able to move throughout the body a lot more easily than if it were to just get pumped by the heart.
And so there's this guy, another doc.
I've interviewed him on my podcast before.
His name is Dr. Thomas Cowan.
He's an incredibly smart guy. He's got all these crazy ideas about cancer and viruses and the way the heart works.
guy. He's got all these crazy ideas about cancer and viruses and the way the heart works. And he has a book, I think it's called like The Heart Is Not A Pump, but it's about how the water that
moves through the body couldn't be moved by the pumping action of the heart. And so all of the
blood in your body is actually comprised of structured water. And that's how it moves through
your body. Is that the guy who kind of has the theory that the heart doesn't necessarily pump?
It's not that it doesn't pump because it does.
I mean it's contractile tissue.
And so that's the pacemaker cells that are triggered by the vagal activity, which we were talking about in the gym about how I got that crazy needle stuck in my vagus nerve a couple nights ago.
It's called the stellate ganglion nerve block.
In San Jose.
Not too far from us.
Dr. Matt Cook in San Jose, he puts a needle right in by the carotid artery,
like three inches into your neck.
It reminds me of that Ace Ventura scene when he goes,
I think I lost him, and then he gets a shot right in the throat.
It's crazy.
He uses ultrasound-guided imaging, and you're laying on the table.
You can see the screen where the needle's going in super close to the carotid artery. And then he takes exosomes and he injects like three cc of exosomes into either side of the vagus nerve.
And it's basically like a reboot for the nervous system.
Exosomes are these little cell signaling molecules.
They're made by stem cells.
A lot of docs will combine them with stem cells to help the stem cells work better.
will combine them with stem cells to help the stem cells work better.
But on their own, they have these natural healing properties that allow for what's called a paracrine signaling effect.
It's how cells talk to each other in the body.
So the idea is if somebody has low HRV or a whole bunch of stress
or poor sleep or whatever, they can get –
why are we watching Ace Ventura?
Because we got to see it.
Oh, yeah, exactly.
Has anyone ever told you that you
you kind of you and jim carrey have similar features yeah you look a lot like he's handsome
by the way so you are jim carrey i've also heard john meyer yeah and you also look like you're 27
yeah by the way yeah it's all the needles in my neck so anyways he he injects it and apparently
you do this like if somebody has like super low heart rate variability or poor balance between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system or they've got like trauma, like deep-seated trauma or poor sleep.
Like a lot of these things are linked to the nervous system.
So the idea is that you do what's called a nerve block by going in and injecting the vagus nerve on either side.
And as soon as he did it on both sides, I like sat up and it felt like I was in total Zen mode.
I mean, we were joking out in the gym.
It was like I got a blow job and slept 10 hours and smoked a joint all at the same time.
I went to bed that night and usually I wake up just like bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at like 4.30 a.m.
And I woke up, and it was like 7 a.m.
And it just totally reboot everything.
But the idea behind the vagus nerve is it's also one of the 12 cranial nerves, and it snakes through the whole body.
It innervates the pacemaker cells
of the heart, causes the cardiac tissue to contract. And so the heart technically does
pump. I mean, it still beats. It's still a contractile muscle. But the force of that pump
is apparently, if you look at it from a physics standpoint, not strong enough to actually move
all the blood through the entire body, through all the tiny capillaries.
So there has to be some form of a lower resistance to flow that allows for the heart to actually get the blood through the entire body.
And the way that that would happen is by the blood being naturally structured.
blood being naturally structured. And so the idea is like if you're drinking structured water and then also getting exposed to photons of light from like infrared light, which charges up that water
the same way as it does in Dr. Gerald Pollack's lab, that you would actually have better cardiovascular
health. Have you heard of plasma water before? I have. I forget what that is. Yeah. It's supposedly
like, Oh wait, wait, wait. I think it's water that's been struck by lightning.
No, no.
Something like that.
Okay.
So I –
I don't know.
This gets weird.
I do know what this is.
It's a plasma generator.
So it's like – and this is like kind of getting big in the health sector called resonance technology where you're actually changing the resonance signal of something such as water.
And when you do that and you structure the water and then also somehow clean the water using this plasma technology, water can then be exposed to an information packet.
So this would be like what homeopathy or what are called infoseuticals are based on. water can then be exposed to an information packet.
So this would be like what homeopathy or what are called infoseuticals are based on. You take water, you expose it to the frequency of, I don't know, like berberine or vitamin C or testosterone or whatever.
Testosterone water.
Yeah, testosterone water.
There's your next market.
And it can carry the signal and hold it in the water.
market and it can carry the signal and hold it in the water and that like the simplest example of this would be like that guy masaru emoto that japanese researcher who who had like all these
little pictures where if you like pray over water or you say like love or peace to water
as opposed to like playing death metal to it or saying words like hate or anger the water has a
different crystalline structure like it's a more uniform structure anger, the water has a different crystalline structure. Like it's a more
uniform structure. And apparently the water is able to carry that same positive feeling into the
body when you drink it. And then there's now this idea that, well, we could just expose water to
like any signal if it's been structured. And if it's in this plasma format, which apparently is
accomplished by exposing
it to some format i don't know how these plasma devices work but the water gets exposed to some
kind of electricity like we were playing beethoven when we made that fucking water yeah exactly and
and um i think the company is like i think it's rpg resonance something something group rpg.io i think is their website and all they do is invest
in resonance-based technologies and i was on their website once they have like this plasma water
generator that apparently makes plasma water and at the very end you can expose it to any signal
and then you drink that water and you're drinking whatever the water was imprinted with.
Yeah.
And so then there's this one company called Infopathy.
And they make a device and you plug it into your computer.
I have one at my house.
And then it's like this disc and you put a glass of water on it.
But the website has like all these things you can choose.
Like, oh, I want my water infused with this signal of digestive enzymes.
Or I want my water infused with the signal of digestive enzymes or I want my water signal with. And so they reached out to me and they're like,
we want to make, he's going to laugh at this. We want to make Ben Greenfield stem cell water.
And so they had the US stem cell clinic in Florida, shipped them up my stem cells I'd harvested from my fat in my back and my bone marrow from when I was 30 years old.
They took the stem cells, added them to their recipe, used the imprint frequency that whatever
the stem cells vibrate at or however that works. And then apparently when you plug it in, it'll
infuse the water with my stem cells. I tried it once. I didn't notice anything.
You chug it and you're like i want some mackerel there's stuff we just like don't understand maybe 10 years from now people will
be like laughing at us like how could how could you have thought that imprinting water with stuff
was silly like like this is now how people take all their supplements is you just put them on
your computer and they infuse it and you drink your supplements or whatever but how can maybe
our average listener uh within a like range, um, take care of their
own water at their house?
Cause I think, um, some of the water we may have access to maybe isn't great.
And like, I don't know how well like a Brita thing works or, uh, how well even just the
water that you get in those big things, uh, works.
Yeah.
That's a great question.
Um, choose one of two technologies that's going to
do a really good job filtering the water. The strongest is RO, reverse osmosis. The second
strongest would be double carbon block filtration. And double carbon block will filter out just about
everything. And then reverse osmosis just gets every last particle you could ever get. It's like
the micron or the particle size of what you're filtering out is best achieved through the
reverse osmosis. And so you would have like a central house filter ideally, or under the
counter or under the sink filter that is reverse osmosis or double carbon block.
Both of those do such a good job of filtering that you're also removing a lot of the minerals from the water.
So ideally, you would remineralize the water by either A, just having a bunch of like Element or Protect or Keaton
or like any of these mineral sources.
And I actually now based on everything I've seen as far as mineral analysis of all these different compounds out there, I think the very, very best way to get the highest amount of minerals in the purest way possible is shilajit, like that black tarry stuff.
That's basically made from a bunch of like old, rotten, fermented plants that have sat underground for like hundreds of years.
It's dark black.
It's like big in Russia.
They call it like the conqueror of weaknesses, destroyer of – I think it's like conqueror of mountains, destroyer of weaknesses, whatever.
But it's a black, tarry substance.
Yeah, shilajit, S-H-I-L-A-J-I-T.
And you would put it in water or put it in coffee or whatever,
but it has a higher amount of minerals than like any substance on the planet.
And I don't think it's ever going to like take off and be super popular
because it doesn't taste – it tastes really earthy and parry.
Nice.
But when you look at a lot of these –
Fuck, I'll eat it.
Supplement companies out there.
I don't care.
Yeah, see, that's on the screen right now.
That's like a Shilajit rock.
And I know some people that will, like, put that in their water.
But then the one I've been eating is called Mana, M-A-N-A.
And it's like a Shilajit liquid that you, like, squeeze in the water.
And, yeah, it looks like that Himalayan stuff on the left side.
And so you could also use like pinches of salt.
Like there are some forms of salt that you can just buy at the average grocery store, back to like what the average person who just wants to simplify things would do.
The salt that's the highest in minerals and the cleanest, meaning like the lowest in metals and microplastics that you can get at most grocery
stores is Celtic. You know, like the little blue bag of Celtic salt. So you could take pinches of
that and you could put that in your water or you could use Shilajit or you could use Element or
Protect or another really good one is called Quinton. You've heard of that before? A lot of
doctors use Quinton, Q-U-I-N-T-O-N. It's kind of like Shilajit, and that is super-duper high in minerals and microminerals, and it tastes like seawater.
It's basically like purified seawater.
Usually it comes in like a glass ampoule or a sachet.
And so if you're using really good filtration, you have to be even more adamant about remineralizing your water or even just mineralizing your food.
It doesn't matter as long as you're getting a lot of salts in by the end of the day if
you're not getting those salts in your water.
And so if you've got double carbon block and reverse osmosis, then you're remineralizing
the water, getting clean water that has the salts added back into it.
And then the only other thing would be if you wanted to structure the water, if you're kind of like buying that whole structuring thing and you're like, okay, so I want my water to be in more like an H3O2 bonded format, then you could use either a pour over.
So they have these little pour over devices that you pour the water through and it structures the water as it goes through the pour over device.
And I have one of those.
Does that take a long time or is it not too bad?
I don't use it for my water because I actually got – I have well water,
and my well water goes through double carbon block,
and then I got one of the structured water filters.
And what it does is after it passes through the carbon block, it goes through that.
So all the water, like my baths, my shower, my tap water, everything is structured. But if you didn't go that, if you didn't do that, let's say you live in like a condo or an apartment or wherever, you can't do the whole house modification. You could also do under the sink structured water filter, or you can get one of these pour overs where you'd take the water from the tap and you'd just, you know, have it in a pitcher or whatever, and you pour it through that. And that's your drinking water.
the tap and you just you know having a pitcher or whatever and you pour it through that and that's your drinking water and i have one of those and what i use it for is wine because i found out when
you you know do you guys ever read tim ferris's four-hour body i think i think it was four-hour
body where he talks about his latte frother trick where you can take like a cheap ass bottle of wine
and you can make it taste really good because one of the ways you you know that's that's why you
would um what's it called when you like air it's why you would, what's it called when you pour the-
Yeah, it's aerating it, but it starts with a C, the big glass, the croff.
I think it's croff that you pour the wine into.
You know how you pour it into something like a big glass container?
I've seen people, yeah.
Yeah, I'm blanking on that.
I think it's called a croff.
But anyways, you would normally like pour your wine into that to allow it to aerate,
you know, before your dinner party or whatever and then you drink it like two hours later.
How dare you just drink that without aerating it first?
You animal.
You could also just pour it in a glass of wine and use a latte frother and get it all
foamy, and that aerates the wine.
It actually does make any wine taste better, but pouring it through one of these structured
water pourers, I guess it's like structured wine, essentially.
A decanter.
That works really well.
And then there's also-
Yeah, a decanter. That's what I was And then there's also, yeah, decanter.
That's what I was looking for.
Not craft, a decanter.
Yeah.
That actually is Tim Ferriss on that video, decanting wine.
This might be the latte frother video as well.
Yeah, it probably is.
He's out of his time all the time, this guy.
Yeah, but then the other thing that you can do with the water or the wine is there's also this other –
there's all these new companies messing around with water stuff.
It's called Onalema.
I wish I had my fanny pack out here because I have both mana
and I have an Onalema wand in my fanny pack right now
because I mess around with this stuff all the time.
So the Onalema is like a wand and it's got structured water inside like this glass tube inside the wand.
And you stir your water with that and it structures the water by stirring it because it apparently takes the frequency of the water that's in the wand and transmits that to the water that you stir it with.
So there's all sorts of different ways you can structure your water.
that you start with.
So there's all sorts of different ways you can structure your water.
But the idea is filter, then remineralize,
and then if you're like a crazy, woo-woo,
hippie, quantum person, then you structure afterwards.
And that's how you do your water.
I don't know if I missed this when I went to the restroom,
but if I did...
Yeah, what happened there?
Yeah, yeah.
Time warp?
Yeah, it happened.
But did you explain what some of the risks are to just drinking your normal tap water or your just normal filtered water?
Okay.
That's a good start.
Well, I mean, just like contaminants.
I mean, that would be the main thing.
But like besides pesticides, your neighbor's birth control pills, you know, whatever is in the municipal water supply.
So, you know, I mean in the municipal water supply. So,
you know, you, I mean, your body does have some filters. I mean, you got your liver and you got your kidney, but I, or your kidneys ideally, but I, I think water's pretty dirty these days. Like
the average municipal water is, is not that great from a chemical standpoint. And I think one of the concerns are a lot of these compounds like chlorine and fluoride
that can displace things like iodine in thyroid tissue and cause issues with the thyroid gland.
Like that's one of my beefs with fluoride.
Like they don't fluoridate the water in Spokane where I live in Washington.
And I like that because I think that fluoride is great for the teeth. Like there's a lot of
data that shows that fluoride is wonderful for oral health. But the problem is like fluoridated
toothpaste, you're going to swallow a little bit of it or fluoridated mouthwash or fluoridated
water, especially because you're actually swallowing the fluoridated water. So I'd rather like use a fluoridated toothpaste and try not to swallow
the toothpaste and then use, drink water that's not fluoridated just because I don't think the
fluoride is that great for the thyroid gland particularly. There's some people that have
like whole websites devoted to all the other issues with fluoride. But yeah, fluoride, chlorine,
you know, pharmaceuticals. You guys are probably seeing the talk about how some of the frogs are becoming androgenic or female, and they're blaming some of that on the water.
Making the frogs gay.
Yeah, making the frogs gay.
Yeah, it's just contaminants.
What about bottled water, like Dasani, Fiji?
And what about when people have the arrowhead shipments to their house?
Yeah, that's the plastic. I mean, the plastic
can have some phytoestrogenic properties
and microplastics can build up in the body.
That's why my tits are so big.
I forget.
I had researched this for one of my books.
I think it was Boundless where I talked about
how you look at the numbers. If you turn over
that bottle, is that Fiji right there?
Yeah, so on the bottom of the bottle, it usually bottle, is that Fiji right there? Yeah. So like on the bottom of the bottle,
usually has a number and Fiji is like one of the good ones.
And you can,
you can tell when you feel it,
when you feel the plastic,
if it's like all crinkling and shit,
like that's usually the plastic that degrades,
but like Fiji's a good one.
And you can get plastic that doesn't degrade.
Like I do a lot of sous vide cooking,
for example,
you guys ever do much sous vide?
Oh yeah. It's beautiful. Have guys ever do much sous vide oh yes
sous vide have you ever done a sous vide brisket i have not okay so i i was talking with my my
father-in-law is like he's pretty traditional barbecue so if he does a sous vide or not sous
vide a brisket you know that's like a 12 to 24 hour process of, you know, typically rubbing the brisket
and then starting up a smoker or a grill at super low temp. And then you're tending that brisket
and spritzing it with like apple cider vinegar and other marinades, you know, every hour sometimes,
and sometimes turning it and maintaining the temperature. I mean, it's a long labor of love to do a good Texas style
brisket. So I was talking with him, uh, it was over the holidays last year. And I'm like, dude,
somebody should invent a grill. Like I should go talk to Traeger or somebody where you could do,
set it and forget it. And you put your, your brisket on the grill and then it has some kind
of like a, like a auger auger or rotating system inside the grill.
It's almost like a sprinkler system where you could set it like every half hour,
you know, based on whatever basin or tank that I filled with on the grill.
It can't imagine that you sleep very much.
Yeah, it would kind of like spritz the brisket.
You could just like go to bed and wake up in the morning
and have like your perfect brisket or 24 hours later.
And so I'm thinking about this on the –
it's like an hour and a half
drive home from my father-in-law's house. And I just, I'm super into grilling and cooking. And
I literally just finished my second cookbook, which I'm super excited about. But the final,
got the final recipe nailed down a few days ago, which was blueberry baked donuts.
And they, they're amazing. I can tell you how to make them if you want. But anyways, so I'm thinking about it and I'm like, gosh, what about sous vide?
Because technically sous vide is a water bath that you set at the exact temperature that you want for the meat.
And then you just walk away.
And typically with a sous vide, you'll like finish it with a final sear to kind of like lock in the flavors and get the caramelization or finish it with a final grill or whatever.
to kind of like lock in the flavors and get the caramelization or finish it with a final grill or whatever.
But I thought, couldn't you just like technically like sous vide a giant-ass brisket
and just like walk away and fill the sous vide bag with all the juices,
all your rub, all your salt, all your spices,
and achieve what you'd be looking for with a traditional Texas-style
melt-in-your-mouth brisket?
And so I tried it,
and I did a 60-hour sous vide. This is so exciting for me.
Giant pot, 10-pound brisket, and rubbed it down, put all my marinades, my oil, my vinegar in there,
everything, and then put it in the water bath. I forget the temperature I used. It was like in the 140s to 150s. And walked away.
And I left it there for 60 hours, came back, turned on the smoker, smoked it for three hours, and then finished it for an hour.
So technically it was only like four hours of my time.
And even that was pretty easy because I wasn't having to stay up all night spritzing it down or anything.
And then I had a dinner party that night.
And people were flipping out over it because, you know, the sign of a good brisket, if it's done, you know, usually
you remove it from the heat and you wrap it in a towel, you put it in a cooler for like an hour to
rest. Then you take it out and you slice it against the grain and serve it to your guests. They
usually just slathered with a bunch of barbecue sauce. When you take it out of that towel, it
should be kind of jiggly, like jello.
Like that's a sign that you got a good brisket on your hands.
When you cut into it, you know, all those juices come out.
It's like melt in your mouth tender.
So this brisket was exactly that after the sous vide.
And so my hopes were up, and then I cut into it, and then I tried it,
and it was just like the best brisket ever.
I mean, granted, I did tell this to a guy who runs a barbecue restaurant.
He said, oh, man, you're missing out on the terroir and the flavor, and it's not about the destination.
It's the journey, and the meat takes on all these problems.
I'm like, I don't care.
and the meat takes on all these problems.
I'm like, I don't care.
I literally had almost no labor at all besides bagging this thing,
putting it in the sous vide, and then transferring it to the grill and cutting it and serving it to people, and everybody absolutely loved it.
But the sous vide, the issue with it is the bags are plastic, right?
Like that's the problem is people get concerned about,
and the same with the water bottles, the microplastics winding up in the meat.
And for a huge brisket like that, I actually did have to use one of those big food saver bags with the – what's the sealer?
The bag sealer, the vacuum sealer.
So that's how I just made a giant food saver bag with a vacuum sealer to do that brisket.
But normally when I sous suv i use a
heat resistant plastic i actually think it's more like a polyethylene called stasher and stasher
makes these bags that you can suv in that don't wind up getting a lot of plastic in the meat
so yeah even with the plastics with cooking and with storing food you got to be careful with that
too but then you know like you can you can use heat-resistant plastic and it's a little bit safer.
But yeah, I try to go with glass bottle when I can.
What kind of – did you cook in like a big plastic tub as well or what kind of like bucket did you use to actually put the whole brisket?
Because those things can get really big.
Yeah, they're big.
I don't have one of the fancy restaurant-style sous vide.
They're almost like a tank that you fill with water and that heats all the water.
I just have a wand.
It's called a Juul.
Have you guys seen this before?
Yeah.
It comes with an app.
You connect it to your phone, and then you set it for whatever temperature you want.
You put the wand in water, and it heats the water and keeps it at that constant temperature.
So I just have a giant, like a stainless steel cooking pot that I fill with water, and then I put the wand in that.
And I do like my pork chops in that.
I do – fish isn't so great unless it's like a real real thick fish
like a halibut um steak's amazing in it like my favorite recipe for sous vide is i get these big
thick beautiful bone-in pork chops from u.s wellness meats and i fill it with dijon mustard
olive oil salt pepper and cayenne and doenne, and do two-hour sous vide.
I think it's 145 degrees that I use for that.
Take it out, finish it with a four-hour sear on either side on stainless steel or cast iron.
It's like the best pork chop ever.
Just because pork chops, you want a good even cook on the inside, but to get that,
you often have to leave it on the grill for long enough to where the outside gets kind of like too burnt and too crispy. So the sous vide is perfect for a good
pork chop. Pat Brodger family, how's it going? Now we talk about meat a lot on this podcast,
which is why we've partnered with Piedmontese and have for years now because they have some of the
best beef on the planet. All right. Piedmontese beef has cuts that are fattier in terms of their
ribeyes and they have also cuts that are leaner in terms of their flat irons.
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Andrew, how can they get their hands on it?
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Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes yeah as as an athlete um you've done
a lot you know hopefully people listening right now hopefully they know some of the things that
you've accomplished did you feel like you needed to learn a lot of these things to advance yourself
as an athlete like learn about uh water and learn about trying to
detoxify the body to like optimize stuff or was just stuff that you're just flat out interested
in i mean like a lot of this stuff right like that's what drives me nuts especially in like
the biohacking industry is people like oh you're gonna break olympic records by whatever stirring
your water with the magical quantum wand like no like it's it's all blood sweat and tears and yeah
you might get an extra one percent of recovery or maybe like you know increase your career time by
paying attention to things like air and light and water and electricity but let's face it i mean like
there's total beasts out there crushing both endurance and strength who don't give a shit
about like whether or not their wi-fi router is plugged in at night or their lighting is circadian rhythm friendly.
For me, a lot of this stuff was basically,
I mean, honestly, I think it's being a podcaster
and maybe writing books secondarily.
But for like 10 years, all my podcast was,
besides the occasional guest, was Q&A.
And you get like the craziest, most random question.
And that, you know, two a month for, I've been podcasting now for like, I think like 17 years,
you know, but two episodes a week, sometimes three episodes a week where all you're doing
is looking at questions from random things people have found in the health and fitness and nutrition
industry. And they're asking you all these questions, then you got to dive down all these rabbit holes to
figure stuff out. And so inevitably, I just get led down all these rabbit holes like, oh, hey,
Ben, what's structured water? Or I heard 5G is not good for you. What about that? And so
things I'd normally not even think about because people are asking about them on the podcast, that's what's kind of led me down a lot of these little rabbit holes.
And now it's just kind of created this vicious cycle where every day it's like a really weird effed up Christmas where like 10 boxes of stuff will wind up at my house.
And I got to open it and test it out and try it.
And so, I mean, it's fun.
But, yeah, I think it's mostly like being an influencer, podcaster, whatever you want to try it. And so, I mean, it's fun, but yeah, I think it's mostly like being an influencer
podcast or, you know, whatever you want to call it. You get exposed to all these new ideas that
you then got to go down and research. But no, for me, uh, the, the athletic piece was always just,
you know, training like that's, you know, I got an exercise phys and biomechanics degree at
university of Idaho and just studied that for the most most part but for some people that don't know like uh because there's a lot of new people what are
some of the i guess more more athletic things that you're proud of or that it's kind of wild
so that people can understand well you're not just somebody who does the biohacking stuff
because yeah they don't pay attention to a lot of physicality you do yeah there's some things
you've done yeah and that does drive me nuts too like like the whole biohacking piece of like short cutting your way to working out and
doing like you know 20 minutes of super slow training with katsu bands on and yeah and i mean
there's there is something to those time hacks but at the end of the day i think a lot of biohackers
just would die if they got dropped in the wilderness with a hundred pound backpack and
had to find their own food and forage for plants and survive in the wilderness.
I think I might die too.
Cold.
Oh, shit.
Not have your eight-feet sleep mattress and chili pad in your tent with your special binaural
beats app.
Like, I actually—
You need my eights?
It actually was pretty funny.
I went to a biohacking summit in Finland like five or six years ago, and part of it involved like this off-site adventure.
So you got all these biohackers with their funny-looking hair and the yellow glasses, and we're getting let out into the wilderness.
And we had to like sleep outside in a tent in the cold Finland weather.
And, I mean, these people were freaking out like most of them
didn't sleep they're sitting up the whole night like just looking shell shocked staring at the
tent because they didn't know how to sleep without all the devices and the essential oils i would
just keep looking at you i'd be like what is what is he doing how's he yeah yeah i'd ask you a bunch
of questions to be annoying yeah so so um the the uh the things that i've done, I mean like I was never that athletic honestly.
Like I discovered tennis when I was 14, like 13 or 14 years old.
And I was homeschooled in North Idaho, K through 12, in a highly conservative Christian family.
highly conservative Christian family. And like my jam was, I was president of the chess club,
you know, on the speech and debate team, you know, played the violin, um, and wrote fantasy fiction novels and just read a lot. Like I was a total, total bookworm. And, uh, even my wife who,
uh, I've known since second grade Sunday school, you school, she had a crush on me in Sunday school.
She just kicked the back of my chair and then she still tells me.
She's like, then I realized that you weren't a ladies' man at all.
Like you're a total nerd.
So I didn't wind up hooking up with her romantically until like my sophomore year of college where at that point –
She put you in a nerd category.
Yeah, yeah.
But what happens when I discovered tennis, I got pretty good at tennis and I actually decided to forsake my dream of writing fantasy fiction and being a computer programmer for video game design, which was also something I love to do, like take apart computers and play video games and design video games. And so I wound up playing tennis at Lewis Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho.
And as a part of becoming a collegiate tennis player and one of the top-ranked high school tennis players regionally, I started to look into exercise and eating.
And so I got my dad to drive me down to Gart Sports, a little sporting good outlet about two miles from our house.
We kind of lived out in the sticks, but we weren't super far out from town.
This was the closest place, and he bought me these 10-pound dumbbells.
I didn't even know what to do with them, but I would lay on my bed, on my belly, and do preacher curls just over and over and over again,
just kind of with the idea that they make me better at tennis.
And then I would watch TV a lot.
Well, I did.
I had a little TV set, and I saw a commercial for this ab training device,
and it was like that isometric one where you contract your abs,
you've got to pull it in.
You guys remember this one?
I don't think I remember that.
It looks like a giant spaceship.
They probably still make some like that.
It's actually a pretty good idea.
It was like an isometric contraction, and you pull this thing in
and then extend it.
So technically you were getting a little bit of upper body where are you like on the ground work no just
like standing okay it's like like kind of like an isometric bracing abdominal as seen on tv
actually it actually was a pretty cool idea yeah way the hell better than a slingshot so
and so um so i started to train for tennis and ran up the hills behind my house and started to get kind of fit.
And I bought more exercise equipment.
I watched Rocky III.
That was like the only kind of like kind of sort of fringe Hollywood movie that my family owned.
Everything else was like Little House on the Prairie and David and Goliath, you know, all these Christian PBS films.
And so I did have Rocky III.
I watched Rocky III like three times a week.
Like every time I'd work out up in my bedroom, I'd watch Rocky three. And so, um, I played tennis
in college and like a lot of collegiate athletes, I enrolled in the exercise science program just
because that seemed like the one that all my teammates were enrolling. I had no clue what I
wanted to do. I thought maybe athletic trainer, maybe strength conditioning coach, whatever. But because I was homeschooled,
I was very intellectual and I was a great student. And I took a lot of courses, a lot of credits,
and took a deep dive into science, math, organic chemistry, biochemistry, microbiology, physics,
everything, just fed through the fire hose on that stuff and i loved it because growing up homeschool i didn't have access to labs or you know chemicals or
anything like that and wound up actually uh studying pre-med so you know went all the way
through i took the mcats i got accepted to six medical schools and i didn't wind up going to
medical school i actually started working for
a hip and knee surgical sales company instead, kind of got disillusioned with that and wound
up getting back into the fitness world. But leading up to that point, all through college,
I had a personal training certification. I got my NSCA, CSCS, my CISSN. And so I was doing all
nutrition coaching and personal training all through college. And at
the same time, I went on from tennis and played whole set for the water polo team, played middle
for the volleyball team, played a ton of pickup basketball, got into bodybuilding my junior year
and went from 180 pounds. I got up to 215 and 3% body fat just training. I think there's some pictures around.
I think I've seen a couple shots.
If you search for like bodybuilding Ben Greenfield, you'd probably find it.
Yeah, you look incredible from what I remember.
Didn't really – I was totally natural, but I had creatine.
I had a sponsorship from ABB Bodybuilding, so I had those little like man-in-a-can shakes.
And I would drink like three or four of those a day. Ton of tuna fish.
You ever have blue thunder?
No.
No.
It's awful.
It had like egg white in it and it would leave like egg whites on your tongue.
Yeah.
It was disgusting.
Yeah.
Jeez.
You look good.
So I got 215, about 3% body fat.
And that was my junior year of college and just cheap steaks and tuna fish and
creatine and you know bricking and so um after that when i was bodybuilding that was actually
me a few years ago that wasn't but yeah um i went up to cordelaine and i watched the ironman
triathlon in cordelaine and so at that point, I was all strength, power, bodybuilding, tennis, volleyball, water polo.
But I watched these guys crossing the finish line of the Ironman.
I'm like, oh, I want to do that someday.
So I went back down to Moscow, Idaho.
I did my first sprint triathlon and joined the triathlon club.
What's a sprint triathlon?
It's a short triathlon.
It's kind of like Spartan races have like the – I'm forgetting the names of them now.
They have the Spartan sprint and they have the next one up and they have the beast and the ultra beast.
And so triathlon is the same way.
Sprint triathlon is 500-meter swim.
Typically, I think the bike rides 10 to 12 miles and runs like a 5K.
Then you got the Olympic distance and then the half Ironman and the Ironman and then the Ultraman.
So I watched the Ironman, and I knew I had to do some shorter races before I got into that.
But I just bit the endurance bug hard and got into swimming and biking and running.
At that point, I knew how to swim because I was playing for the water polo team.
I rode my bike everywhere when I was going to class.
And then running, you know, in tennis, you really don't run much longer than a mile. You don't want to run much longer than that,
just because you don't want a lot of fast twitch to slow twitch muscle fiber conversion.
But I just became a total slow twitch endurance animal, uh, did my first Ironman and just fell
in love with triathlon and did triathlon and Ironman for like 10 years. And then after that,
I got into obstacle course racing and I thought I was going to totally clean up an obstacle course
racing, but I didn't have any strength or power or functional fitness from the, just the chronic
repetitive motion, you know, tighten hip flexors hunched over on the bike, you know, training from
Ironman. So then I had to learn how to like climb a rope, carry a sandbag,
you know, started doing a lot of rucking, started to do a lot of grip strength work.
And I did about five years of racing with Spartan, you know, and got sponsored by Reebok and, and,
um, kind of got in a little bit early in the sport before it got taken over by a lot of really,
really fast runners. And, you know, I realized that I wasn't ever going to beat them.
But yeah, I did obstacle course racing and then finally hung up the hat on that like three years ago.
And now I play pickleball and walk a lot.
Are you addicted to pickleball?
I've been hearing a lot about that.
No.
No?
It's super fun.
Yeah.
It's super fun.
But no, I just like to play with the family.
It's kind of a family sport for us.
But basically, back to finish my answer to your question, yeah, I did.
There's a website called Athlinks where you can go and see the profile of all the different endurance racers out there and see who your rivals are and what your mileage is and everything. And I think my profile on there, I log like 6,000 miles of endurance racing and did the Spartan death race,
you know,
and Mark Devine's Kokoro thing.
And,
you know,
did Ironman Hawaii six times,
which is the world championships for Ironman traveled all over the world
racing for years and years.
So you put your body through it.
Yeah.
Power project family.
How's it going?
Now we've talked about blood work and getting your labs done on this podcast with many different guests, as that's super important
for understanding what's going on underneath the hood. That's why we've been partnered with Merrick
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you can get yourself the Power Project panel, or you can select any specific labs you want to get.
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underneath the hood. Andrew, how can they get their blood work done?
Yes, we have two options for you guys. Head over to merikhealth.com slash power project. That's M-A-R-E-K health.com slash power project.
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that's at merrickhealth.com slash POWERPROJECT. Links to them down in the description as well
as the podcast show notes. Let's just sell people for a second a little bit on rucking
and maybe give some places for people to start. You know, we're always trying just to get people
to kind of take that first step and like what's the easiest thing to do? And it sounds to me like it's fairly easy just to throw on some weight and go on a walk.
So the way I found out about rocking was I started to get interested in bow hunting like six years ago.
And so I found I hadn't ever hunted with the bow.
found i hadn't ever hunted with the bow like i'd i'd shot a few deer with my rifle and that was just kind of kind of randomly during hunting season but i was i never fancied myself as a
serious hunter uh but i bought a bow and i i found a couple guys up in this pocan area who
were buddies who already bow hunted to start to to teach me the ins and outs of hunting and
and you know sense and tracking and camo and just everything that goes into hunting. Like
there's a lot that goes into it. But before I ever even did my first hunt, because I was so into
endurance sports and competition, I signed up for this event called train to Hunt. And Train to Hunt is super cool. Like day one is an obstacle course race with a bow
where you're like under barbed wire, carrying sandbags,
like racing through the forest.
But along the way, you have your bow the whole time.
You have your arrows.
You have about 30 to 40 pounds in your pack.
The pack weight varies according to division.
And you're shooting along the way.
It's like one of the most functional ways you could learn how to shoot under pressure,
carry a heavy load through the mountains, and you're up and down hills.
It was actually incredibly challenging.
And then the next day you have what's called a 3D shoot where you got like 40 different targets,
and you're trekking through the forest, stopping at each target.
And, you know, say we were from 15 yards all the way up to a hundred yards, different animals,
like, like foam targets that they have in the trees. So kind of like golfing, you know, you're,
you're going for, you know, a shot in the vitals, which would result in a, in a certain number of
points that you get. And then there are penalties like, you know, a body shot is going to be a
penalty. A miss is going to be a penalty, and then at the very end it finishes what's called the meat pack so the meat sounds
amazing oh yeah that's an example yeah it sounds really hard yeah so that that's just an example
what it looks like but the meat pack so normally when you're hunting like if i harvest um you know
like an elk for example and um three miles from the truck or three miles from camp, typically if you're on your own and you field dress the your truck, coming back in the next part and packing that out.
Or if you have some buddies with you, you know, you could all three, you know, put 80
to a hundred pounds in your pack and easily get an elk back to camp or back to the truck.
And this train to hunt, the meat pack is supposed to simulate the activity of transporting,
you know, the contents of a large animal in a pack back to where you need
to get it to. And so my division for train to hunt in most years for the meat pack was 80 to
a hundred pounds. That's a lot to ruck with. And this would be over typically a three to five mile
course. The problem with train to hunt. And one of the reasons I stopped doing it was that there's
a lot of very competitive people and they try to run that whole thing. And so if you actually want a podium and, you know, it's typically the person with the best score from the obstacle course race,
from the 3D shoot and the meat pack as far as your total combined time and points,
you're literally like running with 80 to 100 pounds, bouncing up and down on your back, up and down hills.
And I would be sore for like two weeks after.
It totally ripped
up my joints, my low back. Like, you know, it's sane to walk with that weight, but it was really
hard to run with it. But in the process of training for that, I actually had to learn a lot about
internal frames, about how you should put a lot of kind of like lighter material or bubble wrap
towards the bottom of the backpack to allow the weight to be more easily distributed between the shoulders and the low back kind of up and down
each element of the spine and distributed across the entire body. And so the training for that
involved a lot of putting weight in my pack, whether it's sandbags or kettlebells or whatever,
and rucking with it. And my sons also did the junior train to hunt
competition. They're 15 years old now. And so we do a lot of father-son rucking. My wife actually
got really pissed at me. This was back when they were still going to a private school. They're
homeschooled now, but we had a two mile walk to the bus stop and I would load up my pack with all
the weight. And what happened was three times they missed the bus stop because
I thought I was so strong that I could carry a hundred pounds in my backpack to bring them to
the bus stop and we'd go too slow and we missed the bus. So my wife made me quit rucking the boys
to the bus stop. But through the process of doing train to hunt, I really got into appreciating the idea of loaded carrying, not at a fast pace, but a slow pace.
And the cardiovascular, the strength training, the bone density effects of carrying a large weight in a pack, being able to adjust that pack so the weight's evenly distributed through the body. And if you do that, I mean, like just like a weekend, two to three hour ruck, as far
as like total body strength, shoulder strength, you know, low back stability, uh, there's like
a balance component when you're stepping just because with that gate follow through you're,
you're typically, you know, loaded on one leg with that heavy weight. Um, it's, it's wonderful
training. So I still ruck typically about like a hard ruck, like once every couple of weeks or so.
And yeah, I mean, my sons and I even have like a quarter mile course on our land where sometimes
we'll take our bows. We'll ruck through that quarter mile course, stop, shoot, ruck again.
Sometimes like on a Saturday, we'll do like six to eight rounds of that. And it's easy for anybody
to get into because you just say a walk and now walk with a little bit heavier weight and add a little bit of weight each week.
And what's the competition that they have now that's almost all rucking?
It's considered to be a hard event.
It's really popular.
I forget the name of it.
Maybe someone would start with like 10% of their body weight and then work their way from there.
Or a weighted vest.
Or there's another company now that's literally making clothing that's like lined with tiny little microwaves that you can put on.
I got a question for you.
So the fastest marathon runner of all time is Iliud Kipchoge.
And he's like run like a sub two-hour marathon.
Yeah.
To answer your question, yes, beat him i know rocking with a bow here's the question he literally weighs half my body weight
so if he weighed my body weight who would be able to win in a marathon do you think
well i mean there's a lot of variables there all the way down to – from a genetic standpoint, the Kenyans probably have a little bit better red blood cell distribution and VO2 max and oxygen offloading.
So, yeah, I don't know.
If he had to weigh in at 230 versus me.
If he had to weigh in at 230, then all it comes down to would be maximum oxygen utilization, so VO2 max, which is going to be a factor of total amount of oxygen you can take in.
To the red blood cell density and hemoglobin to the ability of the tissues to take up the oxygen, which would
be carbon dioxide, oxygen balance.
And so that's one component.
Then lactic acid tolerance, like how much lactic acid can you actually buffer all the
way down to slow twitch, fast twitch, muscle fiber distributions.
There's a lot of factors there.
And he's probably been doing it for like over a decade or two.
He's been doing it for a long time.
Because if he had to come up –
Make for an interesting Mr. Beast video though.
Yeah.
Let's say if he had to come up to your weight and you guys had to bench, like who's going to win?
Yeah, right.
Yeah, obvious.
Yeah.
Did you ever do much lactic acid testing for your marathon?
No.
No, I haven't done – I haven't gotten into some of the science-y stuff that much. When I quit that job in knee and hip surgical sales and got back into fitness,
one of the first things I did was I got a job managing the gym. I literally like quit my job,
walked across the street into this gym. And at that point I had a decent resume because I'd been
personal training all through college and had my nutrition certification, and I got a job as the gym manager.
I did that for two or three years and did a lot of group training and a lot of classes, and I was like a spin instructor.
And one of my clients was the wife of the team doc for Ironman and Rock and Roll Marathon.
His name was PZ Pierce.
Marathon. His name was PZ Pierce. And PZ and I had this idea of launching like a one-stop shop for sports medicine, where you go in and you have like your physical therapist, your orthopod and sports
medicine physician, your chiropractor, your personal trainer. And so my job, once we launched
this together in Spokane, it was across the street from Gonzaga, I was a director of sports performance.
And so we had like high-speed video cameras surrounding treadmills and bicycles for 3D analysis of gait and bike fitting.
And we had like one of the first PRP machines where we would do like joint injections for all the athletes that were coming in and big functional training facility.
And then we also had an exercise phys lab. So we would literally from that, look at your heart
rate and say, Oh, I'm burning this many calories, this much fat and this many carbs at any given
heart rate. So if you know your, let's say your, I don't know, your marathon heart rate, like a
zone three heart rate, for example, you could actually know exactly how much fat, how many
carbohydrates and how many calories you're burning during the entire marathon, not for the purpose of replenishing everything that you're burning
because you're never going to do that.
Like the top finishers always finish dehydrated and in caloric depletion,
but you can at least replenish something that somewhat resembles your carb-fat ratios.
And then typically you'd be putting back into your body around a quarter
of the number of calories that you're actually burning at that heart rate. But I think that one of the other things that was super cool
that we did was blood lactate testing, which is also a graded exercise test where you're usually
using a finger prick blood monitor and a little lancet that feeds into a lactate monitor and you're looking at the increase in blood lactate at each given progress of the exercise intensity, when you get to – and this is really interesting – four millimolar of lactate, kind of like how when you look at like ketosis, a lot of people are like in pretty full-blown ketosis once they've reached three millimolar of ketosis or of blood ketone bodies.
With lactate, it's four millimolar.
And that's like universal across most humans.
Like as soon as you get to four millimolar of lactate, you've crossed what's called your
anaerobic threshold, at which point it's going to be very difficult to return to fat
oxidation as fully as you were before four millimolars of lactate.
But you're also beginning to oxidizears of lactate, but you're also
beginning to oxidize a lot of carbohydrate, which has implications for how long you can
actually perform. Most people, once they've crossed that four millimolar lactate threshold,
can only go about 40 to 45 minutes. So even during like a marathon for me at the end of an Ironman
triathlon, I knew based on training that with
about 10 miles left in the race, I could go up to my heart rate that I'd tested to be associated
with four plus millimolar of lactate and still be able to cross the finish line. And if I cross
that heart rate before then, I would risk bonking or basically walking to the finish line during those last few miles.
So when you measure the blood millimolar of lactate, let's say you get it measured and you
know the heart rate or the intensity or speed at which you're going to be at four millimolar
lactate. Well, then you basically have your sweet spot to where as long as you're keeping your heart
rate under that during the entire marathon, you're avoiding the bonk or the exhaustion that occurs in many cases. And then
you can get even more nitty gritty. Like I forget right now, I used to have it memorized, but
there's a percentage of the heart rate at which you cross your lactate threshold. That's your
sweet spot. That's your aerobic threshold. And that's like the classic zone two, but it's a way of very precisely determining your zone two heart rate. And that would be the ideal heart rate for say like any of the long aerobic training sessions for a marathon, but rather than basing it off of power or speed or, or approximation of heart rate based on a prediction from your max heart rate or something
like that. You're literally just doing it on your blood lactate levels. And I still think not enough
people use something like blood lactate to determine what their actual heart rate zone
should be, especially during endurance exercise. So these guys could probably use that for jujitsu
as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's a blood blood lactate monitor there's so many cool things that you can do we have a guy uh over at uh uc davis that can test you guys if you want
if you're interested in messing with that and you can it's really neat i've had i've had some of the
testing done before but um at the time i was i had some sort of injury so i wasn't able to do the
like real vo2 max but it still gave me an idea of like when i was crossing the crossing those
thresholds of
fat burning carbohydrate yeah it's super useful as a training metric too because like you look
at like lance armstrong for example we were talking about vo2 max like he didn't have
the best vo2 max i mean his vo2 max actually was not that impressive compared to a lot of his
competitors in the tour de france but he had an incredible lactate tolerance.
And you could almost synonymize that with tolerance to the burn, tolerance to pain,
meaning the percentage of his maximum heart rate at which he crossed over
and reached 4 millimolar lactate, I think it was like somewhere between 85 and 90.
And it is trainable, but basically the higher you can raise your lactate
threshold, the better you're going to be at most endurance activities, even if your VO2 max is not
that high. Like training lactate threshold or, you know, using mechanisms, you know, whether it's
like, I don't know, betaline or citrulline or anything else to buffer lactate is a smarter
strategy than chasing your VO2 max numbers for something like
marathoning or triathlon or anything like that. How does one simulate training lactate threshold?
Do they like, you know, get there in a HIIT session and try to maintain for a certain period?
There's, so when you're looking at endurance performance, there are a few like classic
training sessions to target different aspects of endurance performance.
And I think this has crossover to just overall longevity, like lifespan, healthspan, just your fitness for life.
One of those would be mitochondrial density and mitochondrial proliferation, like what's going to build the most amount of mitochondria.
And that would be a very short burst, typically 20 to 30 seconds. So like slightly above like that creatine
phosphagenic threshold, which would be like 10 to 15 seconds, but not quite glycolytic,
not quite to the point where you're full on carb burning, kind of like a carb creatine mix.
a carb creatine mix.
So 20 to 30 seconds with about a one to four work to rest ratio.
So that would be for the mitochondria.
So we're talking about like, um,
you know,
eight by 30 seconds with two to three minutes recovery between each of active
recovery.
And then you've got your VO two max VO two max session.
And by the way,
the mitochondrial session,
that's one maximum two
times a week. You don't have to do that that much to build mitochondrial density. So very
short efforts followed by somewhat long rest periods and a one to four work to rest ratio.
VO2 max is typically one of the more difficult sessions mentally to train. But again, based on
data, it's only
once every one to two weeks that you would need to do this, but it's around four to six minutes
of maximum sustainable pace. And that means that the effort, let's say if you were using an
exercise bike, for example, if you're starting that effort at 90 RPM, and by the end you're at
like 75 RPM, that wasn't maximum sustainable pace so it needs to
be consistent throughout but it's four to six minutes of duration one to one work to rest ratio
so it'd be like four to six minutes of recovery and typically it would be about four to six rounds
of that like that's like if i'm working with somebody and they want to yeah it's hard yeah
my hack for this used to be when i when i was doing VO2 max sessions was I would make a playlist and I would have all songs that were four to six minutes in duration.
Because they don't have to be exactly the same, but I would have the really hard songs and then I'd have easy songs that were four to six minutes long.
And I would just have four to six minutes of that or four to six rounds of that on a playlist.
And I just had a VO2 max playlist.
And so I just used music to drive me.
So I didn't have to look at the clock.
I just knew, okay, when this song is going,
I go maximum sustainable pace.
Then when it's easy, I go easy,
which for me, especially doing,
if you're doing it VO2 max
and you're just on a trail,
it makes it a lot better
because you don't have to look at the watch.
You don't have to look at dashboards.
Just, okay, when the music goes hard, you go hard.
When it's easy, you go easy.
But that's VO2 max.
Four to six rounds of four to six minutes
max sustainable pace, four to six minutes of recovery.
And then you have muscular endurance.
And the only thing to remember is that none of this takes into account just fat burning, like fat oxidation, just those long, slow zone two sessions.
But the last piece in addition to VO2 max and mitochondria is muscular endurance.
That's synonymous with lactate tolerance.
Muscle endurance would be a longer work-to-rest ratio.
So essentially this would be like a burn baby burn set where you're not recovering for as long as you're working.
This would be like the classic Tabata set.
It's a perfect example, right?
20 seconds hard, 10 seconds easy, eight times through
because you're never giving the lactate enough of a chance to fully buffer.
And then if you really want to turn up the intensity on that,
you do it with BFR or Katsu bands because the lactate isn't able to get out of the muscle.
Katsu bands?
I think the best – like if you want to increase your lactate tolerance,
and Tabata sets are more frequent,
like the mitochondria set,
one to two times a week.
The VO2 max set,
once every one to two weeks.
But the lactate tolerance,
this would be like
two to three times a week
that you'd be doing this.
But you do a Tabata set,
you put on the blood flow restriction band,
so you're trapping the lactate
in the muscle.
And then like the Airdyne,
anything that moves
both arms and legs is better. It's like the Ane the elliptical trainer the one that i use for this
is the uh is the vasper machine if you guys ever seen that i've heard about it and it's pretty sick
it has the blood flow restriction like on it right it's it's like one of the so you know the jokes
you're making about the biohackers this totally fits into that category because it's like an expensive thing that you buy to hack exercise.
But it's a full-body exercise machine.
You might be able to pull one up and show a picture of it, Andrew.
But it's arms and legs, but it's got the – yeah.
So it's got tourniquets.
So you're tourniqueted on the arms and the legs.
So it's wrapped around tourniquets. It's got tourniquets. So you're tourniqueted on the arms and the legs. It's dope. I've used one before.
It's insane.
And then in addition to having the blood flow restricted to the arms and the legs, it circulates.
See that basin, that tank behind the unit?
Oh.
That circulates icy cold water through the arms and the legs.
So it allows you to achieve a higher intensity and higher lactic acid accumulation with a lower RPE.
So it's basically just like trapping a bunch of lactate in the tissue.
And then what I do is – have you guys ever seen like exercise with oxygen training
or intermittent hypoxic training where you're breathing a low amount of oxygen while you're training?
I've seen some people with some masks and stuff like that, yeah.
No, this one's called – the one one I use called a live O2. There's another one called
a cell gym, but what it does is it's a giant bag that fills with oxygen. And I've got this little,
uh, switch on my VASPR where when I put it on negative, all I'm breathing is hypoxic air. So
it sucks a bunch of the oxygen out of the air that you're breathing in. Then
there's another switch that's hyperoxia where you're breathing almost pure oxygen. So what I do
when I'm doing a VASPR session is I'll do a Tabata set where I'll flip it to almost no oxygen at all
on the recoveries and then flip it to full oxygen when I'm going hard. And so that also increases
the lactic acid accumulation. So this would be like the full-on way so that also increases the lactic acid accumulation.
So this would be like the full-on way to like biohack lactic acid accumulation.
But you could also put on blood flow restriction bands or like those Katsu bands and just jam
on the Airdyne for a Tabata set.
And if you do that like three times a week, your lactate tolerance is going to go up considerably.
Let's talk about these masks for a little bit.
I've seen some people training with some different masks and stuff.
I think people can simulate like altitude training and things like that.
I'm not sure exactly what they're using them for.
Maybe you can give us a rundown.
You've got a few different ways to train the expiratory muscles and diaphragm and oxygen tolerance.
One would be the resisted breathing.
So resisted breathing would be literally breathing out against resistance.
So there are devices that you could take on a walk.
Like there's one called the relaxator where you can only breathe in through your nose.
And then when you breathe out, there's a little hole that you can adjust the resistance through which you're breathing out it's like so
the boss rootin thing that we had when i bought boss rootin very similar there's a there's no
one called the nem star but basically it's increasing the the resistance to typically
your exhale while having some mechanism to where you're not able to inhale
through your mouth. You have to inhale through your nose. And all that's going to do is increase
your carbon dioxide tolerance and also train the inspiratory and expiratory muscles and the
diaphragm because you're typically exhaling against resistance. So it's almost like weight
training for your inspiratory and expiratory muscles. Another form of breath work would be
restricted breathing, not resisted breathing, but restricted breathing. This would be like
the freediving classic apnea tables where you're holding your breath for a certain period of time,
then exhaling and holding that for a certain period of time. You could say something like
Wim Hof or a lot of these breath work sessions that are popular. That would also be a form of restricted breathing
or even doing something like going on a walk and every telephone pole, you're breathing out all
your oxygen and taking as many steps as you can with empty lungs, right? And there's some effect
in terms of CO2 tolerance that can be advantageous for endurance adaptations that occur during something
like that. And then the training mask that you were talking about, if it's like that classic
like Bain-like exercise training mask, they used to call that the elevation training mask.
And they actually changed the name because they realized that they were kind of getting laughed at
based on the fact that it's not reducing the amount of oxygen molecules
and the ambient air that you're breathing as would occur at elevation.
All it is is that's basically resisted breathing, right?
And based on a little dial on that thing, there is more resistance to the amount of air that you're breathing in
and the amount of air that you're breathing out. And in addition to that, because you've got like a little area next to your mouth where carbon dioxide is building up every time that you exhale,
you're technically also increasing your tolerance to CO2. And the cool thing about that is, again,
that not only improves your ability to be able to tolerate a higher endurance load because you're
just training yourself to be able to put up with
more CO2 and put up with more lactic acid. But there are some anxiety therapists who will have
people literally breathe CO2. I think James Nestor talks about this in his book, Breath.
They'll breathe CO2. There's even a machine called the Carbogen. And when you train your CO2 tolerance and your body's ability to be able to have higher levels of CO2, there's an anxiolytic effect.
And that's probably why breathwork helps a lot of people who have stress or trauma or anxiety.
Is that a little bit similar to the old paper bag thing that people would do?
Yeah.
It's very, very much like that.
So it's just more expensive and cooler and talked about in a book.
So the CO2 tolerance training is something that you would also get from that mask.
But I think that from a little bit more advanced standpoint, you might be referring to these masks that you'll see people wear that are typically attached to a unit that's either concentrating or decreasing the amount of oxygen that you breathe.
That would be like hypoxico or live O2 or cell gem, where these are literally creating air that
you're breathing that more simulates the type of air you'd be breathing at say like 13,000 feet
elevation, where it literally is reducing the amount of oxygen in the ambient air that you're
breathing. And that would be true elevation training without having to go to a mountaintop to do it. And I like that idea because if you're
doing altitude training, ideally you've got a train high, live low scenario. You're training
high, but you're not because you're not living high under the constant stress of oxygen depletion.
Rather, it's like this hormetic effect of training at hypoxia.
And then after you've done that, whatever, you're driving down out of Mexico City or Park City or Big Sur or wherever back down to where your condo or your hotel or your Airbnb.
And then you got to get in your car and drive all the way back up for like a couple of weeks of altitude training,
which a lot of athletes will do like an altitude training camp.
But if you have the pocketbook,
you could actually buy an altitude training unit like that
and just put it in your gym and do your training.
30K, 20K?
Hypoxia.
I think like I have the LiveO2.
I think that one's like 10K.
I think the hypoxia units vary, but I have the LiveO2, I think that one's like 10K. I think the hypoxia units
vary, but they're like 10 to 15K. I think the cell gyms similar to LiveO2, like around 10K.
And that's pretty cool to have around for simulating hypoxic training, but then also
being able to live low. So yeah, so that's the deal with the masks. That's insane. Power Project family,
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to stick to your nutrition plan, if you're trying to get fit, pretty much if there's anything you're
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Again, eightsleep.com slash powerproject.
Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes.
Do you do anything around like we've kind of brushed upon the Wi-Fi stuff that you were talking about,
but I'm assuming that kind of like Mark,
do you do anything around your sleep to enhance your sleep in the environment?
Uh, you mean trying to introduce what you might experience if you were like a caveman
sleeping outside, but simulate that in your bedroom?
Yeah.
As far as light's concerned, I know you mentioned he turns off a lot of that stuff, but I know that.
Like for me personally, I just mess with the light.
I just mess with the light.
Yeah.
I mean like basic sleep hygiene is controlling light, controlling temperature, controlling sound, and controlling safety.
And people hear that.
It kind of makes intuitive sense.
Like don't look at bright shit before you go to bed at night.
Sleep kind of makes intuitive sense. Like don't look at bright shit before you go to bed at night. Sleep kind of cold.
Don't have barking dogs and alarms and fire trucks in the bedroom.
And try to make sure that you're not in a stressed out state when you go to bed.
But a lot of people really don't fully dial that in.
So I do.
And as Mark indicated, we could probably talk for like
two hours about sleep, but the basics are from a light standpoint, ample amount to large amounts
of natural light in both the blue and the red light spectrum during the day. And so when I
wake in the morning, I, uh, will typically for the first hour or so,
so I don't have too high of a cortisol awakening response, try to avoid bright lights, blue lights,
screens, phones, overhead lights, et cetera. And when I'm traveling and I, you know, whatever,
have hotel hallways, I'm walking down or whatever, I actually wear the blue light blocking glasses that a lot of people think you're just supposed to wear at night.
I'll wear those in the morning because if you think about it from an ancestral standpoint,
we're seeing red light when not just in the evening at sunset, but also at sunrise.
So I'm a big believer the first hour of the day, you try and keep things as red as possible.
I have just like
a cheapo red light headlamp that i got off of amazon that i use to get around the house in
the morning i have the red light glasses and then in what brand of the glasses by the way because
there's so many the ones i use are raw raw r.a. i like them because they've actually done testing
with the lenses to see that they actually block blue light and then they also don't look like
birth control for your head i mean they're actually like fashionable and it's like German
engineered steel and acetate and they're just cool looking glasses. Okay. So anyways,
red both in the morning and at night. So my, my logic is let's make, even if I can't be in the
sunrise and the sunset, my house or wherever I'm, be as red as possible in the morning and as red as possible at night. And you can even install software like Iris on your
computer, or you can use red light producing apps on your phone. And that's what I typically have
enabled both in the morning and in the evening. Most people just think about that stuff in the evening, but my theory is that circadian
rhythmicity begins in the morning and it begins not with a whole bunch of sunlight and blue
light as a lot of people think, but instead involves gradually awakening in the same way
that you might awaken with like a sunrise alarm clock or like those chili pad or sleep
systems now have the
ability to circulate a little bit of warm water underneath your body to gradually wake you.
Or there are haptic devices like the Apollo, like these wearables that'll start to like
vibrate just a little bit. So you gradually wake up. I think the same thing with light,
use a little bit of red light for about the first hour or so of the day. And then of course, in the evening,
you eliminate as many of the blue light sources as possible. So whenever the sun happens to go
down, whatever area of the world I'm in, I put on the red light glasses, but then our bedroom
is all red light and the master bathroom is red light. And my kid's bedroom is red light
and the little cold pool area that I'll
often go out into after I do the sauna at night. It's also just like red light style, you know,
Christmas bulbs around the pool. So it's just as red as possible at night. And then, um, the,
the form of lighting is also really important in your house. And this would be whether at day or night. You want something other than LED or fluorescence.
So the three best forms of light bulbs to use in your house to naturally simulate light would be halogen, incandescent, or OLED.
And I'm not a huge fan of dimmer switches or like these Philips hue systems just because of the amount of EMF that they kick off.
So I just have incandescent light bulbs for the red light bulbs and then incandescent natural bulbs throughout the rest of the house.
There's a newer company called Bond Charge, and they've got a pretty good lighting section, I think, on their website from the ones that I've seen.
And so that's kind of the
deal with the light. And then the temperature, same thing. You just want to be kind of cold when
you go to bed at night. You can use one of those sleep systems that circulates the cold water under
the bed, like the Sleep Me or the, I think, Eight Sleep does cold water. Yeah. But then you can also,
if you don't have access to one of those, you can figure out ways to cool the body like lukewarm shower or soak at some point in the three hours leading up to bed.
Yeah, because paradoxically, when you get the body just a little bit warm, what it does is it counteracts that surge in vasodilation and warming that occurs post-cold bath or post-cold shower.
So it's better to go lukewarm.
And then the other thing that you can do to keep the body cool when you sleep
is to actually wear socks.
And they even did a weird study on that where they show that when you wear socks
during sleep, it helps the rest of the body to cool.
It has something to do with these,
they're called like arteriovenous anastomosis in the feet and the hands.
Socks and gloves.
Yeah.
When you heat them,
I don't do gloves.
Yeah.
But,
but I do.
I got these like little mittens on.
Like hairy gloves that I wear when I sleep.
Yeah.
My,
my mitts.
Um,
but the,
uh,
the,
the socks can work too,
but yeah,
basically that's pretty straightforward.
Like you keep the body cool.
That also includes trying to avoid heavy meals and hard workouts that finish anything closer than three hours before bedtime if you can.
So then you have the sound component.
And again, like I think a lot of people get that the bedroom shouldn't be noisy, but then you can also use a lot of sound hacks, you know, like binaural beats, for example. You know, they make headphones for side sleepers that are soft headphones called sleep phones
that aren't like earbuds or over-the-ear headphones that you can actually sleep with
and listen to a little bit of sound, like with your phone in airplane mode while you're sleeping.
There are also apps like NuCalm or SleepStream or Brain FM.
And all of these produce sounds that I think are even better than silence
in terms of lulling the body to sleep.
Like you hear about white noise a lot.
There's another form of noise called pink noise.
It's even better than white noise for getting the body into its natural sleep cycles.
And so I'll a lot of times use that when I travel especially.
But they've got color names for the different varieties of noise i think it just refers to the frequency and the spectrum
of the sound wave but pink pink noise it sounds kind of like white noise but the best way i can
describe it is it's like a little bit softer so um you you can also of course wear earplugs to
drown out noise and a lot of times if i'm traveling i'll put in earplugs and drown out noise. And a lot of times if I'm traveling, I'll put in earplugs and then put those sleep phones on playing something like new calm over the earplugs. And I just like,
I can't hear anything like, you know, fire alarms or whatever. It's probably, I'm going to die
getting burnt up in a hotel room while I sleep with your socks. Yeah, exactly. With, with my
socks on. Uh, and so the, the silence and the noise is another interesting component and all,
even sometimes like sleep with the earplugs and something like headphones on.
And then if I wake at like 4 or 5 a.m. and I want to grab an extra 20 or 30 minutes,
I'll play like a new calm session or one of these apps that'll do like a quick 30-minute power nap type of thing
and grab just an extra like half hour or so of sleep.
Yeah.
So the noise is another one to think
about. And then the last one would be the safety component. And that would be like, you know,
for example, when I used to check into a hotel room, I just like, you know, slap my laptop on
the bed and lay on there in my belly and get some work done. But the body begins to associate the
bed with work. Same thing if you got business books by your bedside or anything that would cause your brain to associate the bed with productive
activities. I don't have a TV in my bedroom for that reason and also for the lighting and the EMF
reasons. So basically, the bed should be for sleep or for sex, and you should be engaged in
activities during the day that keep you from using the bed for anything else like my sons because they're homeschooled you know i used to
always catch them just like you know laying on their bed in their bellies doing their work or
doing an essay or whatever and i tell them all the time and they they don't do this anymore because
of this like the bed is something your brain should associate with sleep and so uh books by
the side of the bed like like fiction books or enjoyable books or magazines or
things that don't put your mind on work and no working in bed. And they even have gravity
blankets from a safety component. And these are really interesting because when the body has
something heavy on it, it feels more safe. There's this parasympathetic type of trigger that occurs
when you got like a 20,
25 pound gravity blanket on. It's a lot easier than shoving needles on either side of the neck
to activate that parasympathetic system. Gravity blankets are cool. I think the Sleep ME system,
they even have a gravity blanket that circulates the cold water through the gravity blanket.
And from a safety standpoint, the other interesting thing is that back to what you were asking about with EMF, technically that's a mildly sympathetic triggering signal for the body.
I'm not anti EMF.
Like I love technology and there's a lot of benefits to having access to the internet and phones, et cetera.
But arguably the one time when your nervous system engages in the greatest amount of repair and recovery is during that seven to nine hours that you're in bed.
So if you're going to protect anything from high amounts of electricity and EMF or if you're going to hire a building biologist like Andrew was talking about to look at your environment, the bedroom should be the place to prioritize having as few electrical signals as possible bouncing around. And so that
could be everything from like dirty electricity filters in the outlets that are in the bedroom
to you can even buy like kill switches that you can put on the, on the router, on the circuit
board for the bedroom. Um, you guys are going to laugh at this, but I actually, when I get into
bed, I have a remote control and I push that that remote control once my wife and I are laying in bed.
And it goes in the entire bed.
We got like this princess bed with the four bed posters.
A giant silver fabric Faraday cage comes down and surrounds the entire bed.
And you live like I can't send a text message.
I can't take a phone call.
None of my technology even works in bed.
And you feel like
you're in like this peaceful, restorative cave. And my only complaint about it was the first few
times we used it, it felt like the air in there got a little like just hot and sticky. So I put
this tiny little mini oscillating fan on my side that just blows a little bit of fresh air into
his little hole in the fabric. And that is, I mean, it sounds nerdy,
and it sounds like something some stupid biohacker would do,
but it's actually a game changer for sleep, especially, you know,
if you're a guy like me, I'm on the computer a lot, I'm working a lot,
I'm getting exposed to electricity a lot.
And so for me to just be totally shut off from that for my entire night of sleep
is pretty amazing.
And it's literally like a remote control operated faraday cage i had this company called shielded healing do it because they
they sell like the faraday cage curtains but i didn't like having to like pull all the strings
and it'd get like you know crumpled up and the strings would get knots in them so i now have it
on a pulley system where you just push a button and comes down around the entire entire bed some people like go as far to like paint their bedroom with specific kinds of paint and stuff like that, right?
You can use Faraday shielding paint.
And if someone has what's called electrohypersensitivity and they actually tend to get triggered and stressed out and sometimes we get brain fog in response to like Wi-Fi, cell phones, et cetera, I think that can be a good idea
to actually go as far as painting your living environment
with Faraday paint.
The problem with it is if it's done right
and it actually works,
that means you're not able to make a phone call
while you're inside of your house.
And to me, that's like super inconvenient.
Like I'd rather just like sleep with the EMF on,
but I don't want to not be able to use my phone
inside my house,
which is technically what Faraday shielding paint would do.
You could paint the bedroom.
The other issue is that's really expensive because I looked at doing it for my house.
It's like $40,000 to paint the house with Faraday paint.
So this stuff's not cheap either.
So I just like the idea of, okay, let's just protect the one place that I can protect.
And then when I travel, there's this company called No Choice, and they make like a jogging suit that's just
lined with that same fabric. And I wear that when I'm on the plane and it works fantastically. I
sleep like a baby on the plane. It's like a hoodie and everything. I've heard of that. But then if I
get to the hotel and I want to like simulate that same like Faraday-esque type of experience,
I can just pull that on and go to sleep.
Seems smart.
Do you use anything like air purifiers or anything like that or not really?
Yeah, I think that in the same way that you ideally can just filter all the water in your home through a central home water filter.
Yeah.
A built-in HEPA air filter would be really good.
A lot of them have a UV light and also a negative ion generator.
There's one called Aller Air. It's pretty good. that's the one that i have in my house okay and um yeah i mean just based on mold and the fact that a lot of these these duct system houses tend
to tend to build up a lot of toxins mold etc i think it's a good idea to filter and then they
got standalones the same way you got standalone filters for the kitchen you got like uh air doctor
is a good one it's another one called molecule but yeah i i take into consideration the air quality what you got going on over there
andrew actually i use an air doctor that one's really nice but what was the the company that
that make the curtain for your bed that you said shielded healing shielded yeah okay i wanted to
get that yeah the guy that runs that company lives up by me in uh he lives in near sandpoint idaho
brian hoyer and he actually goes to people's
houses with all the meters and he'll do like a full analysis of your whole house and just
figure out you know where you should move stuff or what houses might need some kind of a dirty
electricity filter or whatever so he's kind of he's kind of handy what does some of this technology
uh if you can briefly just describe like what what do you think it does to us in a negative sense like emfs yeah i mean
yeah the the main issue is that it it excites the cell membrane to the extent to where there
is an influx of calcium into the cell and that's a positively charged um mineral and the cell should
technically be at a slightly negative gradient. So it operates best
like negative 30, negative 40 millivolt potential on the inside of the cell. So when you have a
calcium influx into the cell, you're downregulating a little bit of the normal metabolism. Now,
some people get concerned about like the tissue heating and the phone up by the head and brain
cancer. But I think most people know like you're not supposed to put your phone up by your head and you shouldn't like sleep with
a wifi router underneath your pillow. Like the tissue heating I think is less of a concern
than what it can do to the electrochemical gradient in the actual cell itself.
Some people will get concerned about what's called red blood cell clumping, which is like
a stickiness in the blood. And, and I've seen some of what's called red blood cell clumping, which is like a stickiness in the blood.
And I've seen some of these like live red blood cell analysis of like blood
that's exposed to Bluetooth or wifi versus not.
And the red blood cells are closer together, but you know,
kind of like the Masaru Omoto praying over water stuff. Like I don't,
I don't think that the research is that great,
but the impact on the electrochemical gradient on the cells actually is something that you should be concerned about.
And there are things that you can do if you're in a high EMF environment.
For example, one of the ways that you balance out calcium influx into the cells is via magnesium supplementation.
So magnesium would be one factor.
Magnesium would be one factor.
If you look at non-ionizing radiation and the impact that that can potentially have on DNA, there are also certain things that are also popular in like the anti-aging and longevity sector that act as cellular protectants against DNA damage, primarily NAD and sirtuins.
So this would be like the classic like supplements that have have NR and resveratrol in them.
I travel overseas a few times a year, and my jam for overseas is I only wear that Faraday suit when I'm on the plane.
But on the plane, I take NAD, and I don't even take the oral supplementation.
I use a patch because they make these patches that almost give you a slow bleed into your system during the entire plane flight. And I put magnesium and hydrogen in the water that I drink on the plane.
And then I'll still go outside and like do grounding and earthing,
whatever I get to where I'm going.
But the idea is that if you're working in a high EMF environment
and you have that calcium influx into the cell, yeah, I mean,
like keep your phone in airplane mode when you can
and try not to have your desk right next to the Wi-Fi router.
But if you use magnesium and NAD and one of these sirtuins like resveratrol
or pterostilbene or blueberry powder, one of the things that pairs well with NAD,
and you use some type of an antioxidant like hydrogen or something like that,
you can actually do a pretty good job protecting the cells.
And then that Shilajit stuff that I was looking into that we were talking about that appears to have some kind of an
anti-radiative effect as well so there's certain things you can protect your body with from a
supplementation standpoint and some of the information when it comes to like bluetooth
and wi-fi and 5g some of this information appears to be a little bit hidden from us
like uh seems to be a little hard to find?
It might be.
With like the Wi-Fi towers and all that.
I mean, yeah, you could theorize that
because there's such a convenience factor
and kind of like the pharmaceutical industry,
like it's a highly profitable industry
that there might be some incentive
to keep the research a little lesser known.
Because let's face it,
it's one of those like inconvenient truths.
It's like, oh shit,
like if the internet didn't exist, you know know five years from now if we're telling people
you can't use gpt to search or ai to alter your profile photo to make you look like a supermodel
i mean like that's inconvenient for people so i think that part of it is people are just kind of
like la la la la la um but yeah i i don't think there's some like evil Mr. Smithers somewhere out there
rubbing his hands together.
Like I'm going to fool everybody who's going to get brain cancer.
But I, I think that because it's inconvenient and it's not popular and most people hate
it when people tell them, yeah, you shouldn't have your wifi router on during the day in
your home.
Like it is super inconvenient.
That like my home though, like I don't have wifi and I just have ethernet cables.
Like every room has an ethernet port. And when you want to use the internet or even your phone,
you know, with a lightning to ethernet adapter, you just plug into the ethernet. It's faster
anyways. And I feel better. And I don't have to worry about wifi. Some people also use just like
wall timers that you can get like a $25 wall timer that you plug into the outlet, you know,
from Amazon or whatever. And you plug your wifi router into that and you just set it to turn off
at 10 PM and turn on again at 6 AM. So you don't have to worry about it at least while you're
asleep. So yeah, it's inconvenient. Um, I don't think there's like a conspiracy theory or anything.
It's just, yeah, most people don't want to hear this shit. You got there, Andrew. Sorry.
Just for my own amusement. Is this the ab trainer that you used to use as a kid yeah that's that's pretty much it yeah i don't know if that's
the exact unit but that's basically it yeah you hold it against your abs yeah six seconds six
seconds refers to like the contract the length of the contraction is six seconds so it's technically
like you know six times 50 seconds but yeah that is pretty much it that was just for my amusement
but that that is why i've got my abs makes sense it came from um so i'm sure you're just like us
we try to lower the barrier of entry to exercise to basically zero right like earlier you said with
a ruck just go outside so i would imagine like for a home gym equipment you're like well you kind of
have everything you need but sometimes some home gym stuff can make things fun it can make you know
give you a little bit more motivation to to go and exercise yeah now i'm not saying like oh yeah
like a three thousand dollar treadmill and then you get it and realize oh i actually don't like
running at all but is there anything that you've found that's like fairly low,
like easy to obtain that people can get to kind of help like jumpstart
some of like their exercise journey, like to kind of get things going on their own?
Yeah, just get like a $50,000 ARX and a $40,000 VASPR.
Yeah, that's what I was like.
What else do we got?
No, I mean, actually, there's one thing.
I actually got it a few days ago.
It showed up at my house.
You know, it was worn around.
But it's a vibrating exercise bike.
It's made by PowerPlate.
Literally, like, you pedal and it vibrates.
Does the seat vibrate?
Fortunately, no, the pedals vibrate.
Oh.
I've only sat on it for like two minutes.
I left the house and came down here.
But it is kind of cool.
It apparently activates more muscle fibers.
But I would say like if I was going to design like the best minimalist home gym that wasn't like free equipment and just like exercise bands but had the ability to be able to keep you fit for as long as you need to stay fit, I would definitely have an aerodyne or an aerosol.
I mean, for me, that's a no-brainer.
Like, even if I don't feel like working out, like, I can get an amazing workout on that.
So I'd have that.
I'd have blood flow restriction bands just because with minimal equipment,
you can make anything harder and better and trick the muscles into thinking they're under a heavy load.
I would have a range of kettlebells, even just like three.
You know, it's like a 16, 20, and 24, you know, or whatever. Like, there's a lot you can do of kettlebells, even just like three, you know, it's like a 16, 20 and 24, you know, whatever.
Like there's a lot you can do with kettlebells.
And I'd have a really decent foam roller, like a rumble roller.
And let's see if I got one other thing.
Probably a med ball, but like a decent way, weight you know like a 20 to 30 pound
med ball
yeah
sick
kettlebell med ball
aerosol bikes
and blood flow restriction bands
and something for deep tissue work
and I mean
you know
you could fit that
in the corner of a kitchen
definitely
yeah
and then earlier
you just said about the
like the inconvenience thing
and you mentioned
chat GPT
I've barely
scratched the surface
and like I mean
literally like this week
with ai but like dude it's hard to get me away from it if i have a little bit it's so much fun
trainers who are doing their exercise programming right which i could i mean in like in the time
that we've been on air i could like write an article in the style of ben greenfield and it
would it would copy everything that you do.
Right.
Oh,
it's,
it's,
but it's obviously like you can run it through other programs and it'll be
like,
Oh no,
this is AI generated.
Yeah.
But have you been like messing with AI a lot?
Like anything you see coming down the pipeline?
Oh,
there's so,
so much.
It's dizzying.
Uh,
AI valley.com is the website I follow right now to just like get
up to date on all the different apps and technologies and the industry as a whole.
I think that, yeah, I mean, we can go on and on about GPT, but I think that, for example,
the areas I'm personally most interested in using it for is, and this would be interesting for you
guys, as a podcaster,
there's all those transcripts, all those transcriptions, all that audio that's out there.
Any single podcast, you could tell GPT, act as a New York Times bestselling fitness author,
take every podcast that has ever been done on my show on the topic of cryotherapy, cold thermogenesis, and cold water immersion,
and generate a 10-chapter book on the science and how-to of cold thermogenesis.
And then I could go in and edit that even though I likely wouldn't even need to if this was just
going to be like a you know like an average ebook but I could even say and make me three versions
one at a second grade reading level and one at a high school reading level and one like you know
postgraduate highly scientific and I could have like that book from all the content I've created
anyways almost right away that'd'd be one example. Another example
would be, and I did this this morning for a talk that I'm giving at a health summit next month,
I asked it to identify all of the emerging trends in the health and wellness space,
provide me with the jobs that would be created from each of those trends and the top three resources and
links to learn more about each of those trends. And within 30 seconds, I had the entire skeleton
of my talk mapped out. And then third example, and this would just be a fun one, I'm going to speak
at the biohacking symposium in London in June, and I'm taking my family. And I went to chat GBT,
and this is normally something I'd have to pay a travel agent to do or spend a lot of time doing
myself. And I said, I'm taking my wife and my twin 15-year-old sons to London. We're staying
in X hotel from June 17th through the 19th, and we're staying in Y hotel from June 20th
through the 22nd. I gave it a list of all the things that we like to
do. I told it, we like organic farm to table style restaurants were omnivorous. And we like to eat at
places where the locals like to eat. And we like to avoid like tourist trap type of places. And I
said, I want you to create for us for each day that we're there. And each of the hotels that
we're at a walking itinerary that goes no farther than two miles out from the day that we're there and each of the hotels that we're at, a walking itinerary
that goes no farther than two miles out from the hotel that we're staying at as far as like a two
mile radius outside of the hotel. I want you to give me a one paragraph summary of the significance
of each of the different stops that you're recommending that we take along the way. And I want, I think I asked for like three options per day and then I
hit enter. And so what I wound up with was our entire trip planned out for us, which restaurant
to eat out at night, which place to walk my wife and kids to the city, what to show them and tell
them about for each of the different stops that we made. That's genius.
And this was all just like, boom, just like done for me right away.
I mean, I could give you example after example,
but my biggest concern is that because this is an AI-driven model
that it could get good enough to start writing its own code
and begin to, for example, you know,
hack our own electronics in ways that we couldn't anticipate.
And then also it's still trained by humans and the information that's relying upon is
still trained by humans.
And so there is some bias, like, you know, I realize this is going to get political,
but if you ask it to say, like, tell me like 10 good things about
Donald Trump and tell me 10 good things about Joe Biden, the Biden section's like sometimes like 10
times longer. Or like my friend, Joe Mercola, who's kind of a controversial figure in the health
and wellness industry, asked it, he asked it something about him or something about something
he'd written. And it basically was very similar, like a Google suppressed result, like you should not be looking into this individual.
He is dangerous, blah, blah, blah.
And so, yeah, like there's some scary issues about it too.
But I think for practical, just like time hacking components and also content generation that a human being can then later in later on go in and edit and tailor to
their audience i mean like sky's the limit on this stuff especially if you have a bunch of
existing content already from podcasts that you can have turned into other forms of content that
could help people out that you made anyway it's not like a computer made it for you're being lazy
like i think there's a there's a lot of potential too yeah you can even like have that whole
itinerary itinerary written out and then you can ask it to like start booking stuff for you.
Yeah.
And like it's like your own travel agency, but like tailored to exactly how you want it.
It's, dude, it's incredible.
I was messing with it in regards to like who we should book next for the podcast for like YouTube titles and stuff.
Like I'm asking it like what's most likely
to be successful on YouTube in this topic?
And it gave me like, you know, a list of a couple of things.
And it's just, what's crazy to me is that like
when you go searching for something
or like when I'm speaking to you about it,
you know so much already.
And there's other people that know like an insane amount,
but it still feels like it is extremely brand new.
So like that's exciting and terrifying to think
what's going to happen. You know, we already see like the deep fakes and so like that's exciting and terrifying to think what's
going to happen you know we already see like the deep fakes and the like the voice changing things
which are all available right now i've been messing with uh generated images like i'm having
so much fun because i'm originally a photographer so like i love creating imagery but using that
stuff is like it is ridiculously fun but it is kind of weird because as a
photographer, I'm like, oh, I need a picture of Encima wearing Viore.
Damn.
Okay.
Do I get my lights and do I schedule it?
Or do I just have a generated image of a fitness model?
I'm not saying you're a fitness model.
I'm just saying a fitness model wearing Viore clothing at a gym, you know, whatever stage
lighting, whatever it may be.
And it comes out an image and it's like, well, shit, that's pretty damn close.
There's even like models that are being put out of business now because fashion agencies
are able to generate the perfect like ethnicity, body shape, you know, muscularity, whatever
that they want for any given item of clothing.
And, and it's, you know know 10 times better than what they get from
model without the need for an actual photo shoot yeah and then me being super nerdy so like i'm
trying to figure out how to make a consistent character so like let's say i do design somebody
that looks just like in sema it's like now i want in sema in the gym now i want in sema walking in
new york city and it's weird because you can actually start naming them and then they become a person in within your own space right i don't think anybody else can come and like steal it
but it's like a weird thing where like we're creating these digital ai people now and it's
like that is eventually going to become something else as well like we already know everything turns
to porn and sex so it's gonna happen um but you know what i mean like it's porn and sex, so it's going to happen. But you know what I mean? Like, it's just, I don't know.
It's just so weird, like how like it could take a black mirror, like turn very fast.
Very fast.
And what I think is going to happen is human beings, we're going to crave authenticity,
transparency, and begin to value at a very high level things that can be proven and verified
to have been created by a human.
I don't want one of the 800,000 fiction
books out there that were created perfectly with the perfectly mapped out hero's journey
by an AI. I want to know that it's got the messiness and the work and the labor put into
it by an old school C.S. Lewis or J.R.R. Tolkien. I don't want to, you know, in the same way,
I don't want to like eat the lab-grown meat, you know,
big-ass ribeye steak that might taste twice as good as what I get from a steakhouse, but I want
to know that that thing was raised out in the field and it was a cow and it actually was grass-fed
and grass-finished and has all those imperfections and the toroir, you know, that you'd be getting
from the brisket somebody slaved over versus the brisket somebody sous vide. And I think that we at some point are going to crave the human verification component because we're going to value that and the work that was put into it.
And then I also think that even though this is a cash cow right now, like I could say, for example, predict for me all the winning brackets for March Madness, all the horse races that are going to happen down south over the next month, and every UFC fight until the end of 2023.
And I could make money hand over fist gambling by using GPT as my predictive algorithm.
Something inside me, though, wants to like like, still be, like, working outside,
farming, creating, making.
I mean, I'm moving next year to Idaho.
I'm starting a 12-acre farm where we're going to grow all our own food
and we're not getting the soil with probiotics and, you know,
getting all our poultry and changing up the water
and beginning rotational grazing and building the home.
And I think at some point human beings are just going to get sick of just being tied to technology
and want to just be outside, getting our hands in the dirt, getting sunshine, getting fresh air.
And I could see an existence where people are just hunched over computers prompting all day
or like slaves to robots.
And I don't know.
I'd rather just like be poor and outside and disconnected from technology if I had to choose. Hopefully I don't know. I'd rather just like be poor and outside and disconnected from technology if I had to choose.
Hopefully I don't.
I saw a commercial yesterday where it was a dad in the car with his son and there was a bunch of people outside the car.
I don't know if you guys have seen this commercial.
It's referring to like social media.
And he looks over at his son and he's like, you know, all that hate and all that stuff you're spreading.
He's like, go ahead and go tell these people.
It's a really corny, weird commercial.
Yeah.
But it was kind of like more like, you know, because you're anonymous on social media,
you get to kind of say whatever you want.
And that's kind of the first, the first like message I've seen like that.
And I've been talking about this for a while.
I've always thought that like some of these things need to come with a skull and crossbones and some warnings.
Yeah.
Because who knows the impact it will have.
Let's finish this podcast up with you giving us your penis pump story.
Oh.
Well, you don't really know much about penis pumps because I'm looking at yours back there, and it's like an old school hand pump.
Because we like to get our hands dirty around here.
We like the precision of a manual.
Anybody who knows their way around penis pumps knows that a real good, fancy, digital penis pump that will very accurately and precisely dial in your millimeters of mercury pressure and cycle through the different pressures accurately.
Any man worth his salt would know this.
Hands free is the way to go.
Now, of course, I know this because I used to do a lot in the male sexual health sector and for a while was getting lots of stuff sent to my house in, I guess, literally and figuratively, this digital penis pump.
It was like the Cadillac of penis pumps.
And this was post the platelet-rich plasma shockwave injection into the dick.
And so I am a creature of productivity and time hacking.
I am a creature of productivity and time hacking.
And so even though the instructions indicated that one should use their hands to keep the digital penis pump position correctly around your penis as it did the work, I thought, well, if I prop this thing just so against my stand-up desk like this and then get it running and doing its thing,
and that little sealant kind of clasps around the penis and it starts to pump,
I can just be like working on my articles in my email while I pump.
A red light on your nuts, of course, I'm sure. Yeah, and so I got about five minutes in,
and it seemed to be doing its thing and working correctly,
it's in and it seemed to be doing its thing and working correctly and then i heard this like noise and my right ball got sucked up into the pump and you know it creates a seal oh yeah it's
got like the gasket on the bottom of it and i'm looking down there and within like five seconds
my ball is already starting to turn blue and purple from the air getting cut off.
But when you turn it off, it's kind of like, you guys ever use those cupping devices where
when you cup an area, it just won't come off?
You're like squeezing it and sliding it and trying to get a little air in there.
Which is fine if it's on your tricep.
And so I wrestled with that thing while I'm freaking out and watching my ball get suffocated for like a good 60 seconds.
And I finally was able to pull it back out and get it off.
And my ball recovered, but I didn't use a digital penis pump anymore hands-free.
And so, yeah, that's the penis pump story.
Damn.
Yeah.
Wow.
Maybe once we go off air, you could show us the results of the penis pumping. Andrew,
take us on out of here, buddy. Absolutely. Thank you,
everybody, for checking out today's episode. Please drop those comments
down below. There's tons of interesting
stuff that we talked about today, so let us know what
your favorite parts were
down in the comments section below,
especially that last part. Favorite prior parts. Yep, that's
the best part for me. Yeah, and hit that
like button, subscribe, follow the podcast
at mbpowerpro project all over the place.
My Instagram is at,
I am Andrew Z and SEMA.
Where are you at?
Discords down below and SEMA in there on Instagram and YouTube at MCM and
yin yang on Tik TOK and Twitter.
Ben,
where can people find you and everything you do?
Greenfieldlife.com.
Cool.
Thank you so much.
Appreciate it.
I just want people to know this.
Ben is somebody that helps me behind the scenes all the time.
Helps with some coaching.
I ask him a lot of stupid questions and he's always there to answer them. I really
appreciate that a lot because I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to this running thing.
And this is somebody that's been helping out a ton. I want the royalty checks once you bust out
three hours on Boston Marathon. I love it. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is
never strength. I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Catch you guys later. Bye. Bye.